Posts Tagged ‘Sundqvist’

A new microwave electron cyclotron resonance (MECR) atomic layer deposition (ALD) process technology has been co-developed by Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation and Picosun Oy to provide commercial semiconductor IC fabs with the ability to form dielectric films at lower temperatures. Silicon oxide and silicon nitride, aluminum oxide and aluminum nitride films have been deposited in the temperature range of 150-200 degrees C in the new 300-mm single-wafer plasma-enhanced ALD (PEALD) processing chamber.

With the device features within both logic and memory chips having been scaled to atomic dimensions, ALD technology has been increasingly enabling cost-effective high volume manufacturing (HVM) of the most advanced ICs. While the deposition rate will always be an important process parameter for HVM, the quality of the material deposited is far more important in ALD. The MECR plasma source provides a means of tunable energy to alter the reactivity of ALD precursors, thereby allowing for new degrees of freedom in controlling final film properties.

The development team claims that MECRALD films are superior to other PEALD films in terms of higher density, lower contamination of carbon and oxygen (in non-oxides), and also show excellent step-coverage as would be expected from a surface-driven ALD process. The relatively density of these films has been confirmed by lower wet etch rates. The single-wafer process non-uniformity on 300mm wafers is claimed at ~1% (1 sigma). The team is now exploring processes and precursors to be able to deposit additional films such as titanium nitride (TiN), tantalum nitride (TaN), and hafnium oxide (HfO). In an interview with Solid State Technology, a spokesperson from Hitachi High-Technologies explained that, “We are now at the development stage, and the final specifications mainly depend on future achievements.”

The MECR source has been used in Hitachi High-Tech’s plasma chamber for IC conductor etch for many years, and is able to generate a stable high-density plasma at very low pressure (< 0.1 Pa). MECR plasmas provide wide process windows through accurate plasma parameter management, such as plasma distribution or plasma position control. The same plasma technology is also used to control ions and radicals in the company’s dry cleaning chambers.

“I’m really impressed by the continuous development of ALD technology, after more than 40 years since the invention,” commented Dr. Tuomo Suntola, and the famous inventor and patentor of the Atomic Layer Deposition method in Finland in 1974, and member of the Picosun board of directors. “Now combining Hitachi and Picosun technologies means (there is) again a major breakthrough in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.”

MECRALD chambers can be clustered on a Picosun platform that features a Brooks robot handler. This technology is still under development, so it’s too soon to discuss manufacturing parameters such as tool cost and wafer throughput.

As detailed in Part 1 of this article published last month by SemiMD, the inaugural Critical Materials Council (CMC) Conference happened May 5-6 in Hillsboro, Oregon. Held just after the yearly private CMC meeting, the public CMC Conference provides a forum for the pre-competitive exchange of information to control the supply-chain of critical materials needed to run high-volume manufacturing (HVM) in IC fabs. The next CMC Conference will happen May 11-12 in Dallas, Texas.

At the end of the 2016 conference, a panel discussion moderated by Ed Korczynski was recorded and transcribed. The following is Part 2 of the conversation between the following industry experts:

KORCZYNSKI: We heard from David Thompson [EDITOR’S NOTE: Director of Process Chemistry, Applied Materials presented on “Agony in New Material Introductions - Minimizing and Correlating Variabilities”] today on what we must control, and he gave an example of a so-called trace-contaminant that was essential for the process performance of a precursor, where the trace compound helped prevent particles from flaking off chamber walls. Do we need to specify our contaminants?

GIRARD: Yes. To David’s point this morning, every molecule is different. Some are very tolerant due to the molecular process associated with it, and some are not. I’ll give you an example of a cobalt material that’s been talked about, where it can be run in production at perhaps 95% in terms of assay, provided that one specific contaminant is less than a couple of parts-per-million. So it’s a combination of both, it’s not assay OR a specification of impurities. It’s a matter of specifying the trace components that really matter when you reach the point that the data you gather gives you that understanding, and obviously an assay within control limits.

HEMPHILL: Talking about whether we’re over-specifying or not, the emphasis is not about putting the right number on known parameters like assay that are obvious to measure, the emphasis is on identifying and understanding what makes up the rest of it and in a sense trying over-specify that. You identify through mass-spectrometry and other techniques that some fraction of a percent is primarily say five different species, it’s finding out how to individually monitor and track and control those as separate parameters. So from a specification point of view what we want is not necessarily the lowest possible numbers, but it’s expanding how many things we’re looking at so that we’re capturing everything that’s there.

KORCZYNSKI: Is that something that you’re starting to push out to your suppliers?

HEMPHILL: Yes. It depends on the application we’re talking about, but we go into it with the assumption that just assay will not be enough. Whether a single molecule or a blend of things is supposed to be there, we know that just having those be controlled by specification will not be sufficient. We go under the assumption that we are going to identify what makes up the remaining part of the profile, and those components are going to need to be controlled as well.

KORCZYNSKI: Is that something that has changed by node? Back when things were simpler say at 45nm and larger, were these aspects of processing that we could safely ignore as ‘noise’ but are now important ‘signals’?

HEMPHILL: Yes, we certainly didn’t pay as close attention just a couple of generations ago.

KORCZYNSKI: That seems to lead us to questions about single-sources versus dual-sourcing. There are many good reasons to do both, but not simultaneously. However, it seems that because of all of the challenges we’re heard about over the last day-and-a-half of this conference it creates greater burden on the suppliers, and for critical materials the fabs are moving toward more single-sourcing over time.

SMYTHE: I think that it comes down to more of a concern over geographic risk. I’ll buy from one entity if that entity has more than one geographic location for the supply, so that I’m not exposed to a single ‘Act of God’ or a ‘random statistical occurrence of global warming.’ So for example I need to ask if a supplier has a place in the US and a place in France that makes the same thing, so that if something bad happens in one location it can still be sourced? Or do you have an alternate-supply agreement that if you can’t supply it you have an agreement with Company-X to supply it so that you still have control? You can’t come to a Micron and say we want to make sure that we get at minimum 25% no matter what, because what typically happens with second-sourcing is Company-A gets 75% of the business while Company-B gets 25%. There are a lot of reasons that that doesn’t work so well, so people may have an impression that there’s a movement toward single-source but it’s ‘single flexible-source.’

HEMPHILL: There are a lot of benefits of dual- or multiple-sourcing. The commercial benefits of competition can be positive and we’re for it when it works. The risk is that as things are progressing and we’re getting more sensitive to differences in materials it’s getting harder to maintain that. We have seen situations where historically we were successful with dual-sourcing a raw material coming from two different suppliers or even a single supplier using two different manufacturing lines and everything was fine and qualified and we could alternate sources invisibly. However, as our sensitivity has grown over time we can start to detect differences.

So the concept of being ‘copy-exactly’ that we use in our factories, we really need production lines to do that, and if we’re talking about two different companies producing the same material then we’re not going to get them to be copy-exactly. When that results in enough of a variation in the material that we can detect it in the factory then we cannot rely upon two sources. Our preference would be one company that maintains multiple production sites that are designed to be exactly the same, then we have a high degree of confidence that they will be able to produce the same material.

GIRARD: I can give you a supplier perspective on that. We are seeing very different policies from different customers, to the point that we’re seeing an increase in the number of customers doing single-sourcing with us, provided we can show the ability to maintain business continuity in case of a problem. I think that the industry became mature after the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 with greater understanding of what business continuity means. We have the same discussions with our own suppliers, who may say that they have a dedicated reactor for a certain product with another backup reactor with a certain capacity on the same site, and we ask what happens if the plant goes on strike or there’s a fire there?

A situation where you might think the supply was stable involved silane in the United States. There are two large silane plants in the United States that are very far apart from each other and many Asian manufacturers dependent upon them. When the U.S. harbors went on strike for a long time there was no way that material could ship out of the U.S. customers. So, yes there were two plants but in such an event you wouldn’t have global supply. So there is no one way to manage our supply lines and we need to have conversations with our customers to discuss the risks. How much time would it take to rebuild a supply-chain source with someone else? If you can get that sort of constructive discussion going then customers are usually open to single-sourcing. One regional aspect is that Asian customers tend to favor dual-sourcing more, but that can lead to IP problems.

[DISCLOSURE: Ed Korczynski is co-chair of the CMC Conference, and Marketing Director of TECHCET CA the advisory services firm that administers the Critical Materials Council (CMC).]

The inaugural Critical Materials Council (CMC) Conference, co-sponsored by Solid State Technology, happened May 5-6 in Hillsboro, Oregon. Held just after the yearly private CMC meeting, the public CMC Conference provides a forum for the pre-competitive exchange of information to control the supply-chain of critical materials needed to run high-volume manufacturing (HVM) in IC fabs. The next CMC Conference will happen May 11-12 in Dallas, Texas.

At the end of the 2016 conference, a panel discussion moderated by Ed Korczynski was recorded and transcribed. The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation between the following industry experts:

John Smythe, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Micron Technology.

KORCZYNSKI: Let’s start with specifications: over-specifying, and under-specifying. Do we have the right methodologies to be able to estimate the approximate ‘ball-park’ range that the impurities need to be in?

GIRARD: For determining the specifications, to some extent it doesn’t matter because we are out of the world of specs, where what matters is the control-limits. To Tim Hendry’s point in the Keynote yesterday [EDITOR’S NOTE: Tim G. Hendrey, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group and director of Fab Materials at Intel Corporation provided a conference keynote address on “Process Control Methods for Advanced Materials”], what was really interesting is instead of the common belief that we should start by supplying the product with the lowest possible variability, instead we should try to explore the window in which the product is working. So getting 10 containers from the same batch and introducing deliberate variability so that you know the process space in which you can play. That is the most important information to be able to reach the most reasonable and data-driven numbers to specify control limits. A lot of specs in the past were primarily determined by marketing decisions instead of data.

SUNDQVIST: Like the first introduction of what were called “super-clean” ALD precursors for the original MIS DRAM capacitors, Samsung used about 10nm of hafnium-aluminate and it would not matter if there was slight contamination in the precursors because you were not trying to control for a specific high-k phase. Whereas now you are doping very precisely and you have already scaled thinness so over time the specification for high-k precursors has become more important.

SMYTHE: I think it comes down to the premise that when you are doing vapor transport through a bubbler that some would argue that that’s like a distillation column. So it’s a matter of thinking about what is transporting and what isn’t. In some cases the contaminant you’re concerned about is in the ampule but it never makes it to the process chamber, or the act of oxidizing destroys it as a volatile byproduct. So I think the bigger issue is change-management not necessarily the exact specification. You must know what you have, and agree that a single adjustment to improve the productivity of chemical synthesis requires that ‘fingerprinting’ must be done to show the same results. The argument is that you do not accept “less-than” as part of a specification, you only accept what it is.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: The systems in which these precursors are used also have ‘memory’ based on the prior reactions in the chamber and byproducts that get absorbed on walls. When these byproducts come out in subsequent processing they can alter conditions so that you’re actually running in CVD-mode instead of ALD-mode. Chamber effects can wash-out a lot of value of having really pure chemicals moving through a delivery system into a chamber and picking up contaminants that you spent a whole lot of money taking out at the point of delivery. What do you think about that?

GIRARD: Well, this is a ‘crisis!’ When something like this starts to happen in a fab or even during the development cycles, you can’t prioritize resources and approaches you just have to do everything. Sometimes it’s the tool, sometimes it’s the chemical, sometimes it’s the interaction of the two, sometimes it’s back-streaming from the vacuum sub-system…there are so many ways that things can go wrong. Certainly you have to clear up the chemistry part as early as possible.

SUNDQVIST: We work with zirconium precursors for ALD, and you can develop a precursor that gives you a very pure ALD process that really works like an ALD process should. However, you can still use the TEMA-Zr precursor, that in processing has a CVD component which you can use that to gain throughput. So you can have a really good ALD precursor that gives low particle-counts and good process stability and ideal thermal processing range, but the growth rate goes down by 20% so you’re not very popular in the fab. Many things change when you make an ‘improved’ molecule to perfect the process, and sometime you want to use an imperfect part of the process.

FIGURE 2: John Smythe, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff of Micron Technology, explains approaches to controlling materials all the way to point-of-use. (Source: TECHCET CA)

SMYTHE: What we’re doing a lot more these days is doing chamber finger-printing, where we’re putting a quad-filtered mass-spec on each chamber—not a cheap little RGA, but real analytical-grade—and it’s been enlightening. If you look at your chemistry moving through a delivery line using something like the Schrødenger software, it’s not a big deal to see that you can use the mass spec to see some synthesis happening in the line. We joke and call it ‘point of use synthesis’ but it’s not very funny. We are used to having spare delivery lines built-in so we can install tools to try to gain insights to prevent what we’ve been talking about.

KORCZYNSKI: John, since Micron has fabs in Lehi and fabs in Singapore and other places, while they do run different product loads, do you have to worry about how long it takes things to travel on a slow boat to Singapore? Do you have to stockpile things more strategically these days, and does that effect your receiving department?

SMYTHE: What we really need are a few good ocean-going hydrofoil ships! The most complete answer is we first identify which things need ‘batch-qual’ so if we do a batch-qual in Virginia and know that material is going to Taiwan that we have confidence it will pass batch-qual in Taiwan. There are certain materials that we require information on which synthesis batch, which production batch, and sometimes which bottling batch. Sometimes you take a yield hit because you didn’t have the right vision, and then you institute batch qual.

I think most of you are familiar with the concept of ‘ship-to-stock,’ when you have enough good statistical history and a good change management process with the supplier then you can do ship-to-stock and that reduces the batch-qual overhead. On a case by case basis you have to figure out how difficult that is. A small story I can tell is that with Block Co-Polymer (BCP) self-assembly we found one particular element that in concentration above 5 ppm prevented the poly-styrene from self-assembling in the same way, whereas other metal trace contaminants could be a hundred times higher and have no effect on the process. So this gets back to some of our earlier discussion that it’s not enough to know that your trace elements are below some level. Tell me the exact atoms and the exact counts and then we’ll talk about using them. The BCP R&D taught us that in some situations just changing from one batch to the next could increase defects a thousands times. So we will see a bigger push to counting atoms.

[DISCLOSURE: Ed Korczynski is co-chair of the CMC Conference, and Marketing Director of TECHCET CA the advisory services firm that administers the Critical Materials Council (CMC).]

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